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Google and VeriFone to offer mobile payment using NFC technology

17 March 2011 14:36 (UTC +04:00)

Baku - APA-Economics. Google plans to accomplish this through a new partnership with electronic-payments company VeriFone Systems, says a Wall Street Journal source, TMC Net reported.
VeriFone makes the technology â€“ point of sale terminals â€“ that most stores use to process credit card payments. If the partnership works out the way Google hopes it will, VeriFone’s terminals will be able to accept payments from Android (News - Alert)-based mobile devices that are embedded with technology called near-field-communication, or NFC.
Google’s Android is currently the fastest-growing phone platform in the world. The latest Android software, called Gingerbread, includes support for NFC technology. Some other mobile-device makers, including BlackBerry (News - Alert) maker RIM, have said they would build smartphones embedded with the technology, as well.
The partnership with VeriFone was reported earlier by Bloomberg (News - Alert) News.
Among other things, NFC technology lets third-party developers create mobile-payment applications so people can use their phones as digital wallets, tapping them against a register when checking out of a store, said Google.
Later this year, Google plans to test its mobile-payment service in select markets: stores in New York, San Francisco and Portland, Ore., among other places, people familiar with the project told the WSJ.
Sources speculate that the system, once rolled out, will also be available to other handset operating systems. It is unlikely that any resulting service from a potential Google-VeriFone partnership would only work on Android phones, said the WSJ’s source.
Google has been handing out posters embedded with NFC technology that businesses can place on their street-facing windows so that NFC-enabled mobile devices can detect the posters and give the mobile users more information about the store.
According to UK blog Mobiles Please, by rolling out the Google Checkout service to transactions outside the Internet, Google will be able to claim a little slice of any transactions made in a similar way to credit card companies. At present, most people continue to use cash for small payments, but NFC could change this and Google seems determined to be at the forefront.